daughter, and closes her lesson abruptly with a bow. In one of these last fits she so far forgets herself and her role as to express a profound contempt for mésalliances; and Adam, applying her words to himself, believing that he has committed himself by some unlucky word, leaves the house in despair, and does not dare show himself again. Young men in Denmark, it would seem, take their first loves a little seriously to heart; in Hamlet's time, we know, it was the other way. We may slur over the unromantic, though not unnatural, issue of any ambitious passion. Adam goes wrong, and first ruins a young girl whom chance throws in his way; then sinks altogether into low life, under the mingled influences of debts and a feeble craving for society. He is saved by a brain-fever, through which his mother watches him.

The idyllic time of his life now begins. He resumes work for his degree in the university; and meets Alma, a gardener's daughter, at one of the students' balls. It is some proof of power in the author, that he has contrived to invest his heroine with a certain interest beyond that which commonly attaches to the lay-figures of moral portrait-painting. Alma is indeed "not too good forcommon nature's daily food," but she is also not too weak to be respected; her character, based upon duty rather than upon will, is more deep than strong, and she has a power of loving singly without loving blindly. Educated, in the English or French sense, she probably is not; but the demand for high culture east of the Rhine is moderate, and she is certainly above the average of Goethe's heroines, from Dorothea to Gretchen downwards. So far as we can gather, her marriage with a clergyman's son, himself a candidate for orders, would be an elevation for her, but not a mésalliance for him. Before, however, it can be arranged, Adam is summoned to the deathbed of his mother. On board the steamer from Copenhagen he meets his first love, the Countess Clara, now married to a fat, dull country squire, Kammer-herre Galt. Sea-sickness, like death, levels all differences and annuls all enmities; so that Adam finds himself almost unconsciously ministering to the lady's wants, and renewing his old acquaintance. But, with all allowance for the base element in man, for the instinct of flirtation, for the gratification to self-love at repairing a defeat, and for a parvenu's hankering after higher society, it is a little revolting to our sense of moral probabilities that a man like Adam, partly compound of good, should allow himself to accept the countess's invitation to go home with her, at the cost of never again seeing his mother. The heartlessness of the act, however, does not trouble our hero very deeply; and his father warmly applauds him for securing himself a place in the good graces of

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a patron with fat benefices. So the mother is buried; and Adam remains at the house of Kammer-herre Galt, riding, dining out, talking nonsense and flirting with his host's wife for some months, even taking his host's uncle into the confidence of his designs on the lady, and receiving counsel to enjoy life as he can. Let us hope that such uncles are not numerous in Denmark. Of course, only one of two dénouements are now possible, and the one chosen is fortunately half moral. At the moment of a passionate declaration, while the lady is still whispering that she will not consent, Kammer-herre Galt enters the room; and Adam has no alternative but to leave the house,-under the wrath of the insulted wife.

During his apprenticeship to high life Alma has been forgotten or put out of sight; she remains so, now that he returns to his father's house. In fact, the old parson, at present bent on solacing his widowerhood and discharging his debts by a marriage with the miller's daughter, is more ambitious for his son, and positively refuses his consent to the engagement. Adam lets himself be guided, with some compunction, but little real reluctance, into a marriage with the Baroness Mille, the spoiled, wilful, pretty daughter and heiress of a neighbouring squire. We may call her a cross between the English fast young lady and the Continental "emancipirtes Mädchen," though with more of the former than the latter. A good whip, a fair pistol-shot, an admirer of George Sand, and a consummate little flirt,—she settles down into a stout mother of a family, who writes bad novels, and canvasses the praise of newspaper-editors over oysters and champagne. Her final exit in a fit of apoplexy leaves her husband in possession of the estate and title, which have been confirmed to him by royal license for life. He has culminated in successful Philister-dom, to borrow a German expression; in other words, the hot-blooded boy, with a keen sense for beauty and good, has come to accept life as a transaction, and recognise no higher rule than that of success. With one or two failures he achieves it; gets the order of the Great Cross, the title of Excellency, and the post of first director of the theatre. From time to time the ghost of an old sin rises up before him,-a broken companion of his early days, or a woman whom he has ruined and forsaken; and he makes satisfaction after his own fashion by giving alms out of his superfluity. But the better nature in him is almost overlaid with paint and patches, and he has learned to limit his hereafter to the next few years' successful managership at the theatre, when a heavy cold and a bad doctor bring him to the hospital and his deathbed. He is nursed in his last moments by Alma. After her father's death, she has supported herself by needle- and laundry-work, and is known as a good

night-nurse. She holds his head as he passes away in sleep, and does not long survive him. The baron is laid under marble with his wife's forefathers, and the gardener's daughter is carried out to the common burial-ground in a pauper's funeral.

Here it might be thought that the subject of the poem was exhausted. In fact, as the very post-mortem examination on Adam's body has been described, it would seem that more than ordinary security has been taken against his resurrection, even in poetry. But two cantos of the poem remain. One is occupied chiefly with Alma's lyrical pieces, intended to represent the gradual discipline of affliction and the transference of unsatisfied affection to the one changeless object of love. Perhaps these metrical speculations have no very high merit as poetry, especially if they be judged by the standard of In Memoriam. But their position in a book, of which parts are free even to license, gives them a certain interest, the more so as they are intended to justify its final moral. They express the conviction that good must triumph in the order of the universe; that the foul devil's-play which makes chaos of earth will be defeated hereafter, and Satan himself left alone to begin his time of punishment, while "all are gathered into the bosom of mercy." The assumption which underlies this rather Manichæan doctrine. seems to be little else than the Catholic purgatory; a curious patch of old faith in a poet who goes out of his way to protest against the worship of the Virgin. How it is practically applied we learn in the last canto. There Adam's soul is disputed for by two spirits; his good angel and the advocatus diaboli. The counsel for Satan has easy work in proving that the baron's life has not been squared to the precise requirements of the Decalogue. He is answered with the objection, which we should imagine must often be heard in this court, that the law given on Sinai has been repealed, and that the sinner is to be judged by the milder dispensation of abstract morality. As, however, it cannot be maintained that Adam's life has been framed according to Epictetus, he is defended as a product of his time. "What sort of time was that? Was it the age of heroes, idealists, prophets? Was it romantic, knightly, or idyllic? God help us! it was a mere fermentation-period, lighted up only by the nebulous tail of a comet; a time when men were weary of strife, and sick of peace; that had no heart for work, and small sense of honouran age of all-pervading mediocrity." Take Homo as the product of his time, and the man, whose weaknesses must be confessed if he be judged singly, will appear noble by comparison with his fellows. He was eminently a good fellow, an amiable wellmeaning man; and it will go hard with heaven if such are not of its kingdom. The defence is ingenious, but does not seem to

be successful; the advocatus diaboli arguing that the age-if it is like Homo-will have in justice to be damned. His defender now claims salvation for him as a Christian. It is true there is no very certain evidence of his faith; but it must be remembered that he lived in a time which acknowledged neither angel nor devil, and that he yet on several occasions ascribed his successes to Providence; he might have loved his neighbour under happier circumstances; and he was abundant in hope, the third Christian grace. The plea is overruled; and Homo is finally overwhelmed by the vision of the glorified nature he might have been, the ideal he strove after. Just as the quivering scale sinks finally hell-wards, Alma appears and claims him by the law of heaven, that if a glorified spirit will associate her lot with another's, and blend her existence with his, hell ceases to be possible for the sinner. The scale rises again, and Adam is borne off in triumph to the lustral fires of purgatory. Alma abides with him till the probation-time is past: she was chosen by Eternal Love to save him.

Home life in Denmark, if Adam Homo and Andersen's or Hansen's novels may be trusted, has changed very much since the days of Holberg, a century and a quarter ago. Then the playwright delighted his audience with the drunken serf, like Christopher Sly, invested by his lord with a little brief authority; with the burgher's travelled son, who talked French and danced minuets in the street; with the roué who cheats a Jew, and with the club of gossips who discuss the German empire. Every piece testified to strong distinctions of caste, homely manners, and that Toryism of domestic life which would keep every man in his place, and allow foreign customs to be imported only as luxuries for the wealthy classes. Now the country has been Europeanised with French sentiment, German speculation, and English constitutional forms. The nobles are only the shadow of the old tyrannous aristocracy, which drove a people kin to themselves into thrusting despotism upon the crown. Compare Adam Homo with an English novel-hero of rather similar fortunes and mould, Pendennis. Thackeray's typical young Englishman is once doubtful whether he shall not ruin his laundress's daughter, and is another time offered an alliance with the daughter of a baronet of damaged character. But it is difficult to imagine Pendennis taking tea night after night with Fanny's mother as her future son-in-law; and his acceptance by a noble heiress with no doubtful antecedents would have been too improbable for the Dutch school of narrative to venture on. Either education and good breeding are more universal levellers in Denmark than in England, or our extremes are much further apart. Something, no doubt, depends on the respective size of

the two countries. Denmark has the population of England under Queen Elizabeth; and a single theatre in Copenhagen is able to contain the whole ranks of the fashionable world, and to attract all the literary talent of the country into its service. An upper class of squires is scattered over a country of pasture-land, heaths, and wide sand-plains. Under these conditions, the clever young man from town has a certain advantage among the Junker aristocracy, whose simple talk among themselves is of guns and horses and dogs. Even Lord Macaulay was never the great man in his own day that Swift and Steele and Addison were among their unlettered contemporaries. It was a marvellous prerogative to be born one of half-a-dozen authors in a nation.

The morality of Adam Homo cannot be called high. If he is really no worse than common men in Denmark, we must hope that common men are not so frequently tempted. The women, with two exceptions, his mother and Alma, are either actively bad, or at best vulgar and trivial. Allowing that much of this may be due to the supposed literary necessity of giving a somewhat flat story an immoral interest, there yet remains a sufficiently startling residuum in a book which seems to be accepted in its own country as a portrait of national manners. Probably, in the author's mind, the one pure picture of Alma redeemed all. It certainly adds to the thoroughness of the conception, though it points a curious moral, that the moral interest in a drama of nineteenth-century humanity should centre about a woman. Given a man of mere aspirations and vague sympathies, who shall steadily see the higher good and follow the vulgar appetite,-a man neither saint nor villain, neither hero nor quite unheroic, and if we agree with Dante that such a one is not worth damning, we shall be puzzled how to save him. We shall feel the need of attaching him to some good angel,-a Beatrice or an Alma,—and shall not care to inquire curiously into the doctrine of vicarious works. Perhaps it may be added that such contrasts between the sexes are not uncommon in certain epochs of society. No reader of the Nial Saga, to quote a Norse precedent, can forget the singular antithesis of the Icelandic men and women in the tenth century. Nial, Gunnor, and Flosi, three very different characters, are yet simple-minded, generous, and humane, as brave men should be; while their wives appear behind them like furies, sowing discord and bloodshed through the land. Bacon's strong preference of friendship to love, and Shakespeare's plays, with perhaps the exception of Cymbeline and The Tempest, testify to a similar feeling in our own heroic age. At present the whole tendency of literature is to rehabilitate Eve. Mr. Tennyson succeeds in his Princess, and breaks down in what